


gorgon city

by luffia



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alcohol, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-09
Updated: 2015-04-09
Packaged: 2018-03-22 00:44:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3708863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luffia/pseuds/luffia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe they really just fixed her, or maybe she's just a high-tech VI that thinks it's Commander Shepard and instead of arteries and veins she has wires buried under her skin.</p><p>Shepard, post-reconstruction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	gorgon city

She wakes up on top of an operating table and for a millisecond, Shepard thinks she's back on Eden Prime. It's only a millisecond. She didn't survive the gutted animal that were the streets of Earth, become the Hero of Elysium and Savior of the Citadel by being slow on the uptake.

But she is Shepard, and unquestionable victory runs molten through her veins. Soon she is crackling with the blue heat of biotic energy, firing death through the barrel of a gun. She slams a fresh heat sink into her weapon, jumps over a hurdle with the fluid ease of yesterday's battles, and feels the tension of revival ease off her bones.

Yet there is _something_ malicious and dark, tugging at the edge of her consciousness. Even after she finds out she was brought back by fucking terrorists, _it_ is still secret and still there. Taunting her, mocking her, daring her to unfurl its deceptively soft questions.

But she is Shepard, first human Spectre, walks with purpose in her step, slows down for nothing, no one.

_(Spectres are always on a mission.)_

So it's not until she is safely tucked inside her too-big cabin that the fight leaves her body.

She died.

 

**.x.**

 

It feels like hell. It feels real. Her lungs are collapsing, oxygen vanishing and the horrid emptiness of vacuum ripping her throat apart.

Her screams are soundless as she twists uselessly, faces the frozen wasteland of Alchera and burns.

_(Dying is an art, isn't it?)_

Ash, ash– what did Taylor call it? _Nothing but meat and tubes._

What a fucking joke.

Shepard wakes with a start, greedily swallowing oxygen just to remind herself that she could. When she goes splash water on her face, her reflection stares back, thin skin cracking with arabesques, her eyes shining with the eerie red glow of cybernetics.

She looks like death walking.

_"The relationship is symbiotic, organic and machine intertwined…"_

Shepard remembers Sovereign– it had been turian, once, it had been Saren–, similar infernal fire lifting bones and cartilage off the floor. 

She breaks the mirror and bleeds red. Haemoglobin, iron red. _Human_ red. Something chokes in her throat and she realizes it's relief.  

**  
.x.**

 

Miranda is annoyed at the question. "Of course you're you, Shepard. Who else would you be?" 

**  
.x.**

 

Omega. After she speaks to Aria T'Loak ( _Queen if you're feeling dramatic)_ she decides to get Archangel first. Shepard figures a doctor can hold out against a plague a little longer than a man against three different merc gangs howling for his blood.

The bridge is her _(stopped)_ heart pumping adrenaline and her _(collapsed)_ lungs breathing at just the right time to avoid the recoil of her shotgun. She feels so goddamned alive then, and tries to stop herself from outright grinning, tries to remind herself that she shouldn't have _fun_ killing people-

Archangel is Garrus. Garrus Vakarian. Garrus.

"Shepard," he carefully drawls, "I thought you were dead."

He looks at her like he believes, and for a second she does, too.

Then Garrus gets a rocket to the face. Of course he does. 

**  
.x.**

 

Garrus had never seen Shepard consume as much alcohol as she does the weeks after she came back from the death. She slams five drinks back in Afterlife once they recruit Mordin and proceeds to stagger back to the ship– she will behave in a similar manner every time they cut a break, will stop suddenly after she swallows Ryncol at the Dark Star Lounge and promptly passes out on the bathroom floor.

**  
.x.**

 

No one really notices anything. She's _Commander Shepard_ , Savior of the Galaxy and gunning for the Collectors. She defeats the shield and spear paradox: the Reapers may be an immovable object but Shepard is an unstoppable force, and everyone fully expects the former to explode into pieces at her command.

 _(Even hurricanes have their demons.)_  

**  
.x.**

 

_"…organic and machine intertwined, a union of flesh and steel…"_

Maybe they really just fixed her, or maybe she's just a high-tech VI that thinks it's Commander Shepard and instead of arteries and veins she has wires buried under her skin.

Someone fixed her mirror while she was out. She doesn't know who.

Shepard blinks at it through the haze of alcohol and breaks it again.

Her red eyes are wild and hard, asari liquor slugs through her veins and she feels a shard of glass digging into her skin, deep deep _deeper._ It claws into her flesh with increasing desperation, looking for wires, for cybernetics, for a proof of synthetic existence. She finds tissue and bone instead, and shakily stands up with her arm a mess and her clothes drenched in blood.

EDI says nothing, but the next time she comes back from shore she finds the glass replaced with reflective plastic and all sharp objects gone. Gardner complains about the mysterious disappearance of all his knives, but no one really pays attention. 

**  
.x.**

 

"Cloning?" Mordin blinks, licks his lips. "Unlikely, but not impossible. Have cloning facilities on Sur'Kesh. Available to someone with Illusive Man's resources. Implanting memories tricky though. Morality even more. Might have gone insane. Pleased to say you don't display the symptoms."

**  
.x.**

 

" _Does this unit have a soul?"_ asked the geth to the quarians once, and (post hoc ergo propter hoc) their creators tried to shut them down for good and got driven out of Rannoch instead.

Shepard sometimes wonders the same thing: flesh covers the bone but flesh searches for more than flesh, because human is _human_ instead of _meat and tubes_.

She wonders other things, too.

In Horizon, after Shepard fights her way through Collectors, Swarms, Praetorians and Scions, Ashley looks at her like she can't stand the sight.

 _Do I terrify?_ , she wonders. _The nose, the eyes, the full set of teeth?_ The sour metal burn in her mouth takes a while to vanish. Once it does, she feels the ugly stab of regret in her gut, and when a month later Jack tells her not to trust Cerberus, she snorts because she never has.

Shepard eats a mouthful of air and feels real.

**  
.x.**

 

It stops after that. The flesh the grave cave ate is at home on her. This is, after all, not the first time she has done the impossible. 

_(It's not the last, either.)_

She is Commander Shepard and she lives to kill monsters. Beware, Reapers.

Later, she finds her old N7 helmet half-buried amongst the first Normandy's ashes. Shepard lifts her face to the sky and laughs high-pitched and colder than Alchera's ice. Wandjina hangs over her head, a soothing white crown to match her burning eyes. 

Beware.

Death only pissed her off. She rose with her red hair and she will swallow them like air. 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. come on guys. shepard DIED. i can't be the only one who finds it mindfucking.  
> 2\. i stole words from charles bukowski's 'alone with everybody' and sylvia plath's 'lady lazarus'.  
> 3\. i love gorgon city is it obvious yet.


End file.
